The Motorola android phones besides the original Droid use a locked bootloader. This prevents people from writing their own kernels for these phones. A kernel is the basic part of the android operating system that talks to all the hardware and handles giving apps access to your phones parts. Anyways somebody found a way to hijack a program called init, which is the first app that runs on the phone and gets everything else going. They use this hijacked program to load their own little bits of kernel, overwriting Motorola's own kernel. These roms are known collectively as the 2nd-init roms. This 2nd-init process gives rom builders the opportunity to offer features that would ordinarily need a custom written kernel. Unfortunately due to reasons nobody has quite nailed down, these 2nd-init roms tend to have much worse battery life than the roms based on the normal Motorola kernel and motoblur parts. The roms for these phones therefore fall into two types: the blur based and 2nd-init.

Sorry if I missed some or got them in the wrong catagories. A good indicator of what is what is how much customization a rom has. Lots of settings and features means is a 2nd-init rom. Anything recently updated is a 2nd-init rom. Personally I like the features of 2nd-init but I love the battery life and the stability of blur based roms. Everything the phone originally had when it was stock works on blur roms. Can't really say that for any 2nd-init rom.

@Hecksagon, you've got it basically right. A 2nd init ROM is a ROM that dasy-chains its own kernel on but keeps the old kernel too because of the locked bootloader. This is the 'init process' that bogs down battery life. The error you made was that the 2nd init ROMs for the Droid X are typically Gingerbread ROMs using the FroYo kernel as a base, or ICS ROMs using the Gingerbread kernel as a base. VorteX, Liquid and some versions of CM7 are not in fact 2nd init because they're Gingerbread ROMs and run on the stock Gingerbread kernel without adding a custom kernel. It really doesn't have much to do with Blur vs. AOSP. Blur is just Motorola's custom Android, like Samsung has TouchWiz and HTC has Sense.

@lowvolt, I've never had good battery life with MIUI, but if you're keeping the screen brightness up all the time or keeping the phone connected to wifi/3G/GPS all day then that's eating up huge amounts of your battery life. It's best to only turn those features on when you're actually using them, and then switch them off when you're done. I'm running GummyICS right now and getting ~24 hours to a full charge by doing that and on CM7 I was getting 35+ hours

Thanks for the clarification. It's been a while since I've been trying roms on the droid x. Back in the day it seemed like there was a distinct difference between the two. CM and MIUI were always 2nd-init, even the ones like revnumbers using the GB kernel. What are the CM-like roms out now that do not use 2nd-init? If there is a decent CM7 that gets battery life anywhere even ballpark of Motorola code, I'd definitely switch from Liberty.

Not to hijack but after reading this it seems that all non-blur roms by definition have to be 2nd-init since the motorola init process is loaded by the bootloader into a ramdisk at startup and can not be modified. It doesn't matter what kernel the phone is running, its still got a motorola init that must be bypassed. The motorola init then starts calling up other processes that are part of blur. If you do not have the blur apks in the right spots it start force closing and refuses to boot. The 2nd init uses a program to kill all the processes the motorola init creates until just the motorola init is left. Then it hijacks the process id of init and takes over, making it possible for non-blur based roms to load their own code. This is why roms like Liberty have to have the blur.res apk installed.

As far as battery life is concerned, there are several good apps that can help you. Juice Defender is one I like alot. It has coarse (non gps) location based triggers that can automatically turn your wifi on when you are at your house but leave it off when you are elsewhere. It automatically turns off your data and wifi while your screen is off but can be set up to periodically turn them on to get email and such. It also can have a whitelist of apps that it keeps data on even while the screen is off if that app is running. Probably the biggest thing that kills battery is screen brightness. Get a widget to turn your brightness up and down. The automatic brightness settings on the droid x are terrible. Extended batteries are cheap as well. You can get a super large battery for around $15 now that offers over twice the capacity of the normal battery. You will have to deal with a physically larger phone though. If all those things fail for you, I would question yourself whether the extra features offered by these custom roms are worth dealing with the dismal battery life.

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